Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4)

by S J MacDonald

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Buzz said, making that decision without hesitation. It would have been insulting to do anything other than assign her to that role as the most junior Sub. ‘And you’ll be expected to help train and mentor her, just like any other officer.’

  Shion gave a most un-princess like crow of delight. ‘Woo hoo!’ She exclaimed. ‘Real!’

  And with that she was off, leaping down the zero-gee hatchway with a triple somersault.

  Tina was every bit as happy to meet her. She already knew as much about Shion as could be learned from files and Fleet gossip. She had learned even more over the last few days. The first time she had seen Alex von Strada laugh had been just a couple of hours into her shadowing him. He had been checking his mail as they walked across the base, and suddenly just cracked up laughing. She had not been so impertinent as to enquire why, of course, but he had told her, and even showed her the message. It was from the Diplomatic Corps, informing him with a slightly desperate note that Shion and Davie North were currently in a red-light security situation in that they were drawing a good deal of public attention. They were currently exploring the experience of travelling by public transport, something the security team was edgy about in itself. Finding a busker on a sky-train platform, however, they had joined in. Shion could play any instrument, and sing, and was giving a virtuoso performance. Davie was having fun improvising percussion around her and the busker’s jamming session. Quite a crowd was gathering. The Diplomatic Corps wanted Alex’s advice as to whether they should intervene.

  Alex told them no. Shion might be happy to stay there for hours making music with her new friend, but Alex had a good understanding both of Davie North’s lack of musicality and his very low boredom threshold. They would be on their way, Alex said, within ten minutes. And he was right, too. It was just a few minutes later that Shion had sent Alex another of her enthusiastic messages, telling him that she and Davie had been performing music for people. The busker had evidently insisted on giving them some of the money people had flashed to his collecting beacon.

  Alex had burst out laughing again, at that. Davie North was one of the wealthiest people in the League – he owned, amongst many other corporations, ISiS Corps and Vetris Shipyards. Shion had also been given a Diplomatic Corps credit card with a million dollar a year spending allowance. She had never used it, preferring to live on her Sub-lt’s salary, but neither of them, for sure, stood in any need of the twenty dollars the busker had pressed upon them. Their naïve delight in using that money to buy themselves lunch on the train had made Alex laugh, but with such a look of warm affection on his face that Tina had been amazed.

  She had discovered, since, that stories about his warmth amongst friends, and his wicked sense of humour, were if anything understated. He was, indeed, an entirely different man in private. He had talked to her a lot, too, about many aspects of life in the Fourth, including his own account of how Shion had come to serve with them and what it was like having her aboard. So she felt almost as if she had already got to know Shion before they met.

  The feeling was obviously mutual. As Alex introduced them and they shook hands, they exchanged the happiest of grins. For Shion, this was real, her ultimate accolade, being given the same responsibility as any other Sub would be. For Tina, it was her first exo-encounter. And for all the differences in their genomes and cultures, the tall, elegant alien and the stocky human girl recognised a kindred spirit in each other, the spirit of adventure that had drawn both of them to this ship.

  ‘I’m your oppo,’ Shion told her, and with obvious understanding of the importance of formal and informal name usage, asked, ‘Is it Tinika, or Tina?’

  ‘Tina,’ the cadet said, with a tone that made it clear that she never used her full given name, by choice. Then she added, with a hopeful look, ‘ma’am.’

  Shion laughed.

  ‘Shion,’ she corrected. She had adopted the name ‘Shionolethe’ upon coming to the League, leaving behind her the name and titles of her life on Pirrell. It meant ‘free spirit in flight’ in her home language. Some bureaucrat had subsequently amended that to Shion Olethe in the faked ID they’d created for her, but nobody in the Fourth ever called her Sub-lt Olethe. ‘Have you found your quarters and unpacked and all that?’ she queried.

  ‘Yes, thanks.’ Alex had given her ten minutes, on coming aboard, to find her cabin, unpack, shower and change into shipboard rig. She would have to do the official orientation and safety tour, shortly, along with all the other newcomers. That was a pure formality, though, since she was already familiar with every aspect of the ship from the most detailed tech-specs to every complexity of the watch and quarter bill.

  ‘All right – we’ll catch up later,’ Shion promised, explaining, ‘I have to go do the fighter checks.’

  The Heron was the only frigate in the Fleet to carry fighters. They had three of them, swarm-class fighters docked to specially constructed bays on the ship’s belly. Shion was their flight commander. She would be itching to get back at the controls of her favourite fighter, the one she’d named Firefly. It wasn’t usual for the Fleet to name their fighters, but Alex had approved it, so even official reports now referred to them as Firefly, Bluebottle and Wasp.

  She went off, with that, with a ‘See you later,’ that included both Tina and Alex. The meeting had been brief, scarcely a few words exchanged, but it was apparent that they were going to be friends.

  It was another four hours before Davie North came back aboard. Neither he nor their other civilian passenger was allowed on board until the ship was certified as back in service with a status of ‘in training’. That meant everyone signed aboard, all watch posts manned and thorough diagnostics completed. Skippers were allowed a full twenty five hours for that on reclaiming their ships from port-watch. The Heron’s crew, however, would have been embarrassed for such checks to take more than a morning. It wasn’t even lunchtime when Alex called the Port Admiral.

  ‘Reporting Heron ready for active training duty, ma’am,’ he told her, at which she glanced at the time and laughed.

  ‘So noted, Captain,’ she replied, signing the certificate her end, and giving him a nod. ‘My compliments to your ship’s company on their usual speed and efficiency.’

  ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ said Alex, and smiled as the official notification went up on the board and the crew cheered. It wasn’t the coordinated ‘three cheers’ the Fleet considered appropriate for such moments, just a loud happy noise of applause, whoops and hands drumming on tables. Some of the new officers looked a bit shocked, just for a moment, glancing at the skipper on the open comms feed that showed the command deck on screens throughout the ship. Then they obviously reminded themselves that this was the Fourth, and they were just going to have to get used to that kind of thing. Lt Commander Sartin did not react at all, though very close observation might have detected a very slight compression of his lips as some of the crew set up a flickball style chant: Go Heron – we rule!

  ‘All right,’ Alex put an end to that very quickly, though his tone was one of amused tolerance. ‘If we’ve got that much energy, ladies and gentlemen, let’s not waste it. Full strip-down, go to.’

  That got a cheer, too, and laughter. This was what made them a crack ship – under regulations they could now spend anything between a week and two months in shakedown training and drills to ensure that all the newcomers were up to speed before they became fully operational.

  Even way back when he’d first taken command of the corvette Minnow, though, Alex had had his own ideas about what constituted good practice. He had trained his crew to carry out full strip-down diagnostics of the kind that most Fleet ships would only undertake once or twice a year. Alex expected his crew to carry out such strip-down testing routinely before launch. As the old hands at least knew very well, too, it was a favoured method of his to shake new and old crew in together, running strip down over and over again till it was so slick they could do it in their sleep. There was nothing, he said
, more effective either for training new crew up in ship’s systems or in working them into a smoothly functioning team. What it involved, after all, was effectively dismantling virtually all the ship’s systems, testing every component and putting it all back together again.

  They were already hard at work just a few minutes later when Davie and their other passenger arrived. Tech teams were at work all over the ship, with a busy hum and whine of tools and the choral effect of many voices working checklists.

  Davie rolled his eyes a little as he came aboard, recognising what that meant.

  ‘That is verging on obsessive, you know,’ was his greeting to Alex as he strolled onto the command deck. His retinue, Alex knew, would have gone into shock at the sight of him. He had had his hair cut short so that it was a scruff of dark curls,not only unglossed but unbrushed. His stylists would not be able to put it back into ringlets now even if he gave them the chance. He was wearing off the peg clothes, too. They were notably quieter than the kind of thing he’d worn before; as Alex had suspected all along, his insistence on wearing bizarre combinations, clashing colour and style, had been rebellion against the team of valets who kept trying to dress him in silk suits as Papa preferred. Now he really was free to choose for himself, he’d opted for a grey sweatshirt, lightweight sports pants and soft-soled deck shoes. He would, Alex knew, soon change into the shipboard rig he was allowed to wear without insignia, blending in with the crew as much as he could.

  As he spoke, Davie glanced at an array of screens showing footage from around the ship. Shion could be seen working there with a couple of techs, stripping out one of the fighters’ telemetry systems. ‘I don’t suppose...’ he looked at Alex, saw the answer on his face, and sighed.

  ‘Sorry,’ Alex said. He understood how Davie felt. He was, after all, a more than competent pilot and engineer, skipper of a yacht that was actually bigger and faster than the frigate, and rather better informed, even, than some of their own officers. The newcomers were having to be shown some of the Heron’s hot tech, systems they were testing as part of their R&D remit, whereas Davie already knew it inside out.

  Alex, however, remained immovable. He did not doubt Davie’s knowledge or ability. It wasn’t even that he was a civilian – suitably qualified civilians with the necessary security clearance could help out with tech on a working passage basis. The sticking point for Alex was that Davie was just fifteen years old. He understood entirely how maddening that had to be for someone of Davie’s intellect and abilities. He owned and ran major corporations and had been an accredited goodwill ambassador for the Diplomatic Corps since he turned fourteen. It was just downright ridiculous, as he pointed out, that Alex would not so much as allow him to change a pin chip on the Heron.

  But there it was, and in this, at least, Alex was not prepared to bend the rules at all. Davie might have become an adult, legally, at fourteen, but he would not become eligible for military service till he turned sixteen. The same rule applied to civilians working aboard – Kate Naos, a maths prodigy working with the Second, had been obliged to wait several months till she was old enough to come aboard and carry out her research. Alex, therefore, would only allow Davie to travel with them as a juvenile. He was stretching a point, in that, as far as he was prepared to go, by not following pre-sixteen rules in appointing an officer to be Davie’s official guardian.

  ‘Tuh!’ said Davie, but obviously knew there was no point arguing about it. Both of them knew, after all, that he had no official right to be aboard the ship, and that Alex might well reconsider that situation if Davie was becoming a nuisance.

  Davie was aboard, in fact, at the suggestion of the First Lord. Dix Harangay had told Alex that he might take Mr North along with them, at his own discretion, if Mr North was willing to continue his role as an exo-ambassador with Shion. The Stepeasy would be accompanying them, too, with Davie’s ship to hand as a fall-back just in case Shion should decide at any time that she had had enough of being with the Fourth and wanted to do something else. Alex, Davie and Shion were all happy with that, as were the Diplomatic Corps. The only people not happy with it were Cerdan Jennar and others who felt that allowing a fifteen year old any kind of involvement in diplomatic affairs was beyond even the outrage they’d come to expect from the Fourth.

  They were not the least appeased in that to be informed, under nine ack alpha clearance, that Davie North was uniquely qualified to support Shion, since they had similar physical and intellectual abilities. The medical term for Davie was gehs, genetically engineered homo sapiens. His physiology certainly fell outside the range defined in the Homo Sapiens Identification Act, so he was technically not human. He had been born on a League world, however, and given League citizenship, and nobody was about to go up against his father by trying to have that citizenship or any of its rights removed from him.

  One of the reasons Davie and Alex were friends, though, was that Alex was not the slightest bit impressed either by Davie’s superhuman abilities, tremendous wealth or the power he undoubtedly had as a member of the Founding Families. Aboard ship, he was treated just like any other fifteen year old passenger. And both of them knew, too, that Davie would rather be here, with all the frustrations of not being allowed to do tech work, than anywhere else in the galaxy. He went off quite happily, at any rate, heading for the wardroom to unpack his kit. Their other passenger, having stood back politely while Davie talked to Alex, came over to shake hands with him then, exchanging friendly smiles.

  ‘Good to have you back with us,’ Alex observed.

  Mako Ireson grinned. Technically, he’d been back with the Fourth for more than three months, now, having accepted a post as liaison between the Fourth and the League Prisons Authority. He understood what Alex meant, though, that it was good to see Mako back aboard ship, heading out with them on operations. He was with them, ostensibly, to monitor the progress of the first civilian to join them under the scheme he had himself proposed.

  That was not, it had to be said, going very well. There had been, initially, more than fifty applicants for places on the scheme. Candidates had to be either ex-prisoners or on parole from civilian prisons, with some kind of spacer background and otherwise meeting normal Fleet recruitment criteria. The selection process had whittled that down to seven, of whom Alex had accepted four. Two of them had quit even before leaving their homeworlds, unable to cope with the media blitz that exploded around them. A third candidate had dropped out just three weeks into training, deciding that military service wasn’t his thing after all.

  That left the last man standing, Banno Triesse. He had come aboard with the rest of the crew, having completed basic training weeks before. He was rated probationary star and, like any first voyager, expected to spend the first month shadowing an experienced member of crew before being rostered for duty. He was, however, already at work, handing tools for his mentor. There was no need, really, for Mako to come aboard to monitor his welfare; all of them knew he’d be fine. Mako, though, had asked if he might come with them if it wouldn’t be too much trouble. He could justify it professionally as seeing the scheme through for a full report to the LPA, but it was understood that what he really wanted was to be in on the adventure. If rumour was true, there was a good chance they might be heading out to Quarus, and Mako would claw through the airlock with his fingernails for such an opportunity.

  ‘Thank you, skipper.’ With some little pride, the Prisons Inspector pointed one way, then the other. ‘Port. Starboard. See? You don’t have to tell me this time.’

  Alex laughed. In many respects, Mako Ireson was a natural born spacer – adventurous, sociable, hard-working, everything you could ask for in a shipmate. Unfortunately, this was combined with a level of scientific understanding and technical skills barely above that of an eight year old. The crew found his incompetence highly entertaining, but they were fond of him, too – he was, as he knew very well, regarded as their pet civilian.

  He and Davie would not be the only civilians on board,
though. It was less than an hour before the Second Fleet Irregulars’ teams started coming aboard. There was no hurry about that. They had been told that they could come aboard any time between the frigate going back on active status and the day before they launched, giving them the better part of a week to get themselves and their gear aboard. Alex was not surprised, though, to find them signalling requests for boarding straight away. For one thing, they would want time to get all their gear aboard, unpacked and set up. And there would, for sure, also be an element of concern just in case the ship launched unexpectedly and left without them.

  They were certainly all very keen. A few of them were old friends – the first was Professor Sandy Arbuthnot Maylard, known as Sam to his friends, who’d been with them on the Karadon operation. He was primarily a physicist specialising in forcefields – the Maylard cannon still in field trials on the Heron were a significant development in non-lethal weaponry, effectively a stun-gun for starships. He would certainly be working on improving those systems while he was aboard, but being something of a polymath would also be working on the ongoing biovat project, developing their ability to produce fresh fruit and vegetables aboard ship. He had brought a research assistant with him to help with that, a thin, pale post graduate who looked as if he hadn’t seen daylight or a square meal for quite some time. Then there was Lt Commander Guntur ‘Gunny’ Norsten, a Fleet officer but on attachment to the League Cartographic Service. He was here to continue the work that Kate Naos had started, trialling the system that created detailed wave space charts from their own engine telemetry. He, Alex knew, was as good as having another officer on the team. He was just as pleased to see Mack McLaver coming back aboard, having formed a good opinion of the systems engineer the last time he was with them.